EXCERPT:
HOTEZ: “The simple answer is, only about 15% of eligible Americans have been vaccinated with a single dose. So this is still moving much slower than we really need to go. We need to accelerate our vaccination program to 3 million Americans a day and unfortunately we don’t have the vaccine supply yet in order to do that. So that’s problem number one. Problem two is the fact that you might say, 'Okay, well, it’s been going down now, it's plateauing a bit.' It's still plateauing at a pretty high level, but the thing that’s really scaring everyone, including myself, is the fact that we have this B.1.1.7 variant and we’ve seen how that variant behaves, that variant of concern. It popped up in England in September, and by December had swept across England. And now we know it’s more transmissible than the other parent strains of COVID-19 virus. And the U.K. government has put up numbers, which have not been peer-reviewed, but they're looking pretty compelling, that there’s higher mortality rates. So, we worry that — I’ve used the term eye of the hurricane — the big wall is coming and trying to warn Americans that this is not a time to relax our restrictions, especially the governors who are all high-fiving themselves saying we’re out of this. We’re not. We’re not going to be out of this until we get much further along in our vaccination program. There is good news ahead as we head into the summer months in terms of fully vaccinating the American people, and now we know vaccination in many cases is halting asymptomatic transmission. So a lot to look forward to, but right now we’re in a dire time potentially.”